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The White Man's Burden

Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good
Aug 20, 2011baldand rated this title 4 out of 5 stars
I liked this book much better than the previous commentator but agree with that person that it has a lot in common with Dambisa Moyo's Dead Aid, and that Moyo wrote the better book. Easterly writes as a former IMF insider about Western assistance programs and gives readable and highly useful summaries of his own and other people's research. There are mini-biographies scattered throughout the book on Third World people working to improve their own lives or those of their compatriots that are touching and truly inspiring. Easterly is much less successful when he argues essentially that all Western political and military interventions abroad have been fruitless. He assumes a historian's mantle that doesn't properly fit him. For example, he writes as if in the Bosnian War in the 1990s, only the Serbs committed war crimes, never the Croats or the Muslims. (In fact, there are lots of passages that suggest his knowledge of history was garnered from reading the collected speeches of William Jefferson Clinton.) When he denounces the West defending South Korea against aggression in the Korean War, he goes beyond simple cluelessness, and seems slightly unhinged.